sagemath on Manjaro (or Debian)

[wdt]

>Is there any way I can prevent this?
Change uboot? PCM or mrfixit, I recommend latter
OR
try a different SD card

[pine76]

>Is there any way I can prevent this?
Change uboot?  PCM or mrfixit, I recommend latter
OR
try a different SD card

Hi,

I am new here and not sure about uboot, PCM or mrfixit. Can you help me? I used the debian installer directly from Manjaro KDE and I was so confident I could use without issues. The img files have not been working for me. I tried to burn them using balena etcher and figured out they don't work. I only have success with fedora 32, whicth I burned on Gnome disks utility in a Kubuntu machine.

I can try another SD card but most of the img files seems not working for me. With img files provided in the wiki, I have success only wiht Fedora; none of the others including debian stable, kali, ubuntu family, even manjaro xfce worked for me. I am satisfied with bullseye anyway and I want to stay within here if I can.

Best,

[wdt]

I hope you know to get DECENT SD cards, this is quite important
Better sandisk or any samsung evo are best, larger tend to be faster (>32)
Larger will have more room for wear leveling, not so important for a seldom booted
mbr or gpt mbr is 1 or 34 sectors at start of card
bios equivalent, idbloader, uboot, ATF (arm trusted firmware) are in 1st 16M
idb starts 64 sectors, uboot 8MB, atf 12MB, user partitions at 16MB (32768 sectors)
often uboot and atf are joined together, uboot padded so atf at right location
If this is happening, uboot will be >4MB,, maybe 6.5MB
Specifics: you didn't say if you tried mrfixit's distro, I recommend for a repair/recovery
(on smaller SD card, 16M, so you have enough room to copy another image too)
Do the update, icon on bottom bar to right, then you have his uboot, updated if you wish to use it
(/usr/bin/mrfixit_update.sh,, updates uboot & kernel)
Manjaro has 2 images, one for ONLY use on SD, other to install to emmc FROM SD
(ie , burn to SD, use to install to emmc, NOT a live system, press esc after 30s to show screen)
PCM's uboot can be found from git addressed in forum thread General Discussion ->
U-Boot with direct NVMe boot support for eMMC/SPI Flash
My guess is that you don't realize how important GOOD quality SD's are
This is not a camera, in a cell phone the os is not on card
If you check the cards that boot, I bet they say U1 or U3 as well as class 10
--edit-- BTW, always check for fakes, 1st thing when you get card,
even amazon has sold fakes,, f3 or htestw

[pine76]

I hope you know to get DECENT SD cards, this is quite important
Better sandisk or any samsung evo are best, larger tend to be faster (>32)
Larger will have more room for wear leveling, not so important for a seldom booted
mbr or gpt mbr is 1 or 34 sectors at start of card
bios equivalent, idbloader, uboot, ATF (arm trusted firmware) are in 1st 16M
idb starts 64 sectors, uboot 8MB, atf 12MB, user partitions at 16MB (32768 sectors)
often uboot and atf are joined together, uboot padded so atf at right location
If this is happening, uboot will be >4MB,, maybe 6.5MB
Specifics: you didn't say if you tried mrfixit's distro, I recommend for a repair/recovery
(on smaller SD card, 16M, so you have enough room to copy another image too)
Do the update, icon on bottom bar to right, then you have his uboot, updated if you wish to use it
(/usr/bin/mrfixit_update.sh,, updates uboot & kernel)
Manjaro has 2 images, one for ONLY use on SD, other to install to emmc FROM SD
(ie , burn to SD, use to install to emmc, NOT a live system, press esc after 30s to show screen)
PCM's uboot can be found from git addressed in forum thread General Discussion  ->
U-Boot with direct NVMe boot support for eMMC/SPI Flash
My guess is that you don't realize how important GOOD quality SD's are
This is not a camera, in a cell phone the os is not on card
If you check the cards that boot, I bet they say U1 or U3 as well as class 10
--edit--  BTW, always check for fakes, 1st thing when you get card,
even amazon has sold fakes,, f3  or htestw

The SD Card I am using is a Samsung Evo Plus with 256 GB storage. I bought this from a local Best Buy shop. I thought that this would be a good card to use as I will be living in this card.

I used something similar to mr fixit when UEFI was a pain to use with Ubuntu. My MS laptop was completely skipping the Linux install. I can give it a try if you think it can fix. It is just that I don't see the reason it would skip the sd card. The symptom is below:

When I leave the laptop off for a few hours and decide to power it on, the laptop skips the SD card and boots into Manjaro. When I reboot from Manjaro or shutdown and power it on again shortly, I am able to boot into my Debian system.

I was hearing about fake SD cards and I read a few reviews on Amazon regarding them. There was one review stating he bought a card and it came with 2GB storage space instead of 32GB (or maybe more claimed, I don't recall). It was a Samsung Evo review. I just checked my storage capacity (256GB) with a df -h command and I seem to have 256gb indeed.

I need step by step instructions in case you want me to try mrfixit or similar. I can also buy another sd card and see if it makes a difference.

If you think it is the case, I can order another card, maybe a Sandisk and see if it makes a difference?

[wdt]

df -h will NOT show if a card is fake,, f3 or htestw(for win) write a sector/cluster every GB,
read it back to check. A fake "wraps"after real size is full. The test will take some hours, run overnight
I would not suggest for your 256GB SD
https://github.com/mrfixit2001/debian_de...226.img.xz
A bit dated as a main OS, based on stretch, 64bit kernel and 32bit userland, put on 16 or 32GB card
balena internally does something like [zcat|xzcat] <image>|dd of=somewhere, don't need to expand image
Nor do you with dd, pipelines work well
I am inclined to think the problem is manjaro's uboot, a work around is from login screen (sddm?),
drop down menu in upper right, pwr button icon ->reboot
If you have an UPDATED mrfixit SD, changing uboot on emmc is easy
save emmc mbr, write 1st 16M SD ->emmc, restore emmc mbr

[pine76]

df -h will NOT show if a card is fake,, f3 or htestw(for win) write a sector/cluster every GB,
read it back to check. A fake "wraps"after real size is full. The test will take some hours, run overnight
I would not suggest for your 256GB SD
https://github.com/mrfixit2001/debian_de...226.img.xz
A bit dated as a main OS, based on stretch, 64bit kernel and 32bit userland, put on 16 or 32GB card
balena internally does something like [zcat|xzcat] <image>|dd of=somewhere, don't need to expand image
Nor do you with dd, pipelines work well
I am inclined to think the problem is manjaro's uboot, a work around is from login screen (sddm?),
drop down menu in upper right, pwr button icon ->reboot
If you have an UPDATED mrfixit SD, changing uboot on emmc is easy
save emmc mbr, write 1st 16M SD ->emmc, restore emmc mbr

Ok, I will try f3, which seems to be available on Fedora 32. If I need to do it outside my micro sd drive, Manjaro Kde is still available so I can search for f3 there? Otherwise, I will need to buy a 32GB card and try on my 256GB card?

I have been struggling for a week to setup everything to make me concentrate back on work. It seems more difficult than I thought. I am about to choose between Debian Bullseye with Gnome or Fedora Workstation 32. Debian Bullseye is giving me extra problems such as sound card, unusual "poff" noises, and Bullseye is refusing to connect my 2TB drive with "exfat" errors. I had a 1TB hard disk and Bullseye recognized and mounted it without a problem, puzzling.

Both Debian and Ubuntu families disappointed me for now. Luckily, Fedora 32 seems working. I burned it on the Micro SD card and everything from keyboard to soundcard is working as intended. When I was installing Sagemath, it gave me a not enough space error. I realized Fedora uses only the image size of the img and does not touch the rest of the 256gb. I resized it easily with Gnome Disks to 256gb and now it is working nicely.

However, the boot problem is persisting with fedora as well. There is also a small annoyance with plymouth splash of fedora not working but this seems to be the best I can get.

I will keep you updated if I make any progre

[User 18618]

Does testing install an LTS kernel (4.19, 5.4) by default? If so, you may want to install 5.7 or newer, which has improved support for exfat. You still require the userspace tools for exfat - as far as I know, this is exfat-progs.

Regardless, it seems you are finding success on Fedora. While this is not a solution, you can bypass the SD card issue by installing your OS to eMMC.

[pine76]

Does testing install an LTS kernel (4.19, 5.4) by default? If so, you may want to install 5.7 or newer, which has improved support for exfat. You still require the userspace tools for exfat - as far as I know, this is exfat-progs.

Regardless, it seems you are finding success on Fedora. While this is not a solution, you can bypass the SD card issue by installing your OS to eMMC.

Ah, I switched back to Debian Bullseye again. Fedora felt too heavy but currently Debian Bullseye Gnome is chewing up my processor and battery with 'evolution-calendar'. I had a slight problem in connecting to bluetooth in Debian i don't have it. Debian has other issues...

On Bullseye, uname -r  command gives me 

5.5.0-1-pinebookpro-arm64

Afaik Debian stable is on 4.19 kernel. I have eliminated to restore my files from the 2TB hard disk by removing the sd from pbp, plugging sd with adapter into my laptop and doing all the backup restoration process there. It was very easy and i can't believe I spent more than a week in restoring my files directly on pbp.

[User 18618]

It's worth noting that you are not bound to a distribution's default desktop environment. I believe the Pinebook Pro images focus on providing a usable graphical environment - if you are unable to use a conventional installer, you can still remove unwanted packages.

Debian offers gnome-core and gnome-shell as leaner metapackages for GNOME, should you wish to remove the gnome metapackage from a tty. If packages aren't a dependency of the metapackage (evolution-data-server is a dependency in gnome-core and gnome-shell, whereas evolution is a dependency in gnome), you can remove them without risking breakage.

Moreover, you can use the tasksel interface to install different desktop environments. Though removing a DE via this interface doesn't seem to work in the same way as via apt.